Friday night's practice bake. This is the 2nd attempt at neapolitan pies. Two doughs were mixed Thursday evening from the 2 little red bags of Caputo. One used the home made starter (I'll refer to it as the Atlanta starter) and the other IDY. The flour weight 987. For the IDY, 2% IDY was used. 3% Atlanta starter was used for the other. Hydration was 57%. Mixed for 5 minutes on the KA and then let to rest for 1hr. Took it out of the bowl and then did 2 folds and placed in the container and cooler. The IDY bulk fermented for 24 hours but it was quickly obvious at the end of it that 2% is too much for that length of time--the dough almost spilled out of the container. Probably less than 1% should have been used. In order to rescue the dough, they were balled (280g each) and placed in the fridge which was reset to 38 degrees. They stayed there 13 hours until a couple hours or so before baking. The IDY doughballs opened ok. They were easier to work with and could be opened using the slap technique. Sliding them to the peel was easy; there was no worry about tearing. There was a moderate amount of resistance when stretched (ala da Michele) on the wooden peel.

After last week's attempt, I spent some time practicing managing the heat in the oven. The top-down firing method did indeed work better. The oven was saturated with heat for 1.5 hours. After pushing the coals to the side, it took 15-20 minutes for the floor to even out. After that, it took a log or two (small ones split from the standard 16-18' firewood) to get a rolling fire. The floor stabilized to 850F and a bit above and keeping oven fed with small logs maintained that. After a pie, the floor took 1-2 minutes to recover as long as there is a rolling fire across the dome.

As with the pies, they were a lot better than last week's. The dough was SWEET. It had a crispy exterior and a much softer and pillowy inside. It became tough after it cooled down though. However, when I reheated a slice this morning, the crust came back alive.

The Atlanta starter based dough was just taken out bulk fermentation and balled this morning. I'm looking forward to more practice tonight.

forno, the pizzas look really good.how easy is it to move that oven around? is it the same dome that is in the primevera 70? also you have sometype of a log holder in there can you give me some info on it?looking forward to seeing tonight's bake!!thanks,larry

forno, the pizzas look really good.how easy is it to move that oven around? is it the same dome that is in the primevera 70? also you have sometype of a log holder in there can you give me some info on it?looking forward to seeing tonight's bake!!thanks,larry

Hi Larry. Thank you. The oven is very easy to move around. I would have loved it better if they put bigger wheels on it. In the future, I plan on putting bigger wheels, maybe pneumatic ones so I can roll it on rough terrain. Yes, it is the same guts as the Primavera 70 but I guess FB used their new refractory technology on it. The log grate I found is called The Grated Mini Fatwood Fireplace Grate (http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1LENP_enUS461US461&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=The+Gratest+Mini+Fatwood+Grat). I got mine from Woodland direct. As you can see, it's the perfect size for the oven. It glows red when the oven is in full blast. The first time I saw that I got scared and quickly removed it with my peel. Then I remembered that iron has a melting point at more than 2000F.

BTW, I love what you're doing to your P70. The stand is beautiful and painting it a different color every year is a great idea. I may think about raising the floor on my oven like you did.

measure your floor to center if you are at 13.5 inches or less you are fine. john d.has the same oven and his was lower than mine so i raised it to get 13 inches.i think mine was one of the first builds and the floor may have been set lower. this year i am going to try a multi color chip material that you scatter over epoxy paint to get a marble look.i did it in my basement and liked it, so i bough the black, gray ,and white chips for my baby. my wife says the house needs painting,but i have priorities.

The best tasting pies to date. The dough just had a hint of sourness and all the complex delicious flavor of a long fermentation (a bit of wheaty sweetness). It reminded me of the pizza we had last fall at Franco Manca in the Chiswick neighborhood of London. The texture was crispy on the outside yet very tender and very easy to chew.

The winner of tonight was the Plantain pie. It was slap yo momma delicious.

These naturally leavened pies were more preferrable to the IDY pies from Friday night. The dough was a lot easier to open, strong but yet easy to stretch (did not spring back at all) on the peel. I was finally able to replicate the way Da Michele stretches their pies on the peel.

Mixing: 5 minutes on KA. 1 hour rest. 2 folds then on to the fermentation container.Leavening Agent: 2% very very young starter (younger than the one used for Tartine style bread)Hydration: 57% (water at 45F)Salt: 3%Fermentation: Approximately 36 hours bulk at 60F. 24 hours balled between 70F -76F.

Overall a C+. Lots of lessons learned but still a very long way to go. The pies are, I think, ok to serve to guests and I think I can hunt for better ingredients and recipes now.

Dude that was incredibly quick progress. Overall C+? Are you kidding me? I think others will agree with me, your latest pies look PHENOMENAL. Better than mine for sure. Outstanding work. What was the hearth temp and bake time on those beauties? You've got me wanting pizza and I just finished eating dinner!

Thank you all Had it not been for all the experience you've shared on this forum, these pies would not have been possible.

@Chau--your tip with the starter was spot on. I got worried that the dough didn't rise much after 36 hrs and took 24 hours in balled form to rise. Also was worried that the pie was going to be too sour again. They turned out to be the better than I expected. The floor was somewhere between 800F-850F most of the time. The margh's bottom was a bit too charred for my taste because I launched it too soon; I had just put in a slightly larger log, it caught fire big time very quickly and the floor might have reached near or over 900F. In your experience, what temps are appropriate for 57% hydration pies? Next time when the floor gets too hot, I'll just lift the pie and let it cook on the turning peel.

@Craig and @Robyn--Plantains are PERFECT for pizza. My wife was planning to cook them wrapped in egg roll wrap and deep fry them--a popular Filipino snack known as "Toron". Then I thought about slicing them like pepperoni and just putting bufala milk based butter on the pie. The caramelized slices plus the creamy melted butter plus the tart wheaty dough; they were a party in our tummies. My daughter, who is turned off by char on the pizzas (she got brainwashed by the pale pies they serve at preschool) actually liked this! This will be a regular on my weekly bakes. I'll go for thinner slices next time and put more of them.

Very nice work! I loved the pictures of the unloading! I am in the process of ordering the Andiamo 70. Unloading it and getting it to the back is going to be very difficult, i might have to take apart my fence. If you don't mind I have a couple of questions.1. How did you get that colour red? They told me it was only available in Bronze colour. 2. Second, Are you able to get more than one pizza in there at a time? 3. How long is your heat up time, to 900F?

Very nice work! I loved the pictures of the unloading! I am in the process of ordering the Andiamo 70. Unloading it and getting it to the back is going to be very difficult, i might have to take apart my fence. If you don't mind I have a couple of questions.1. How did you get that colour red? They told me it was only available in Bronze colour. 2. Second, Are you able to get more than one pizza in there at a time? 3. How long is your heat up time, to 900F?

Thanks,

Danny

Hi Danny When I was ordering, they had 3 colors available: green, bronze, red. I guess it depends on what they have in stock. It is possible to have 2 10 in pizzas in there. However, it will take a lot of skill with the peel and possibly a smaller peel of 6 inches to properly dance with a pie. On the videos on youtube, they made turning the pies look so easy. I quickly found out that it will take a lot of practice to attain some decent peel kung fu. The 45 minute heat time is possible. However, I like to saturate the oven with heat so the floor recharge time between pies is minimal. During the first weekend of baking, I had the floor at 900F. I think that was too hot and I got too much charring at the bottom. Last weekend, I was playing with different floor temps but I think most of the time it was from 800 to 850. The oven's behavior is not quite stable yet. I heard that over time (from the Primavera 70 owners which is what the Andiamo 70's guts are made of), it will be more predictable. I fire up the oven 2 or so hours before cooking the pies. It's still very early days and I'm still climbing a steep learning curve so I have not really developed a solid workflow yet.

Make sure to get good seasoned firewood. If you can get kiln dried oak, that's perfect. Also, I split my firewood into smaller pieces of about 16 inches in length and 2-3 inches in the cross section. I use a hand operated log splitter that I got for a reasonable price at Harbor Freight.

Owning a WFO is great fun. The learning curve, at least for me, is steep but there are a lot of smart helpful folks in this forum and also the Forno Bravo forum.

The dough was mixed on Thursday night and bulk fermented until they were balled on Saturday morning. A very young natural starter was used; it tasted slightly sweet and slightly tart. The hydration was around 57-58% and significantly less salt (2.3%) was used.

I think I may figured out how to make a creamy white crust with a lot of blisters on it. The oven was saturated with heat for 2 hours. With the floor temperature between 850-880F and the flames licking the dome all the way to the other wall, the pies cooked between 50-60 seconds. A little bit of rotating and moving the pie to prevent excessive charring on the bottom was done. The oven floor--it gets better every weekend--is a lot more even as far as how the temperature is spread out. Combined with the long fermented dough, the pies blistered easily. The crust was thin and crispy; the interior had large irregular holes and when eaten they were very light.

The 12 hour bulk fermented + 8 hour balled pies did not have the same appearance even though they were cooked in the same oven conditions. Visiting family (specially the kids) like them all the same because the dough was sweet. The had oversized blisters and were just brown.

Important lessons learned from this weekend: a) oven control b) turning peel control c) launching pies (no inadvertent calzones..though 1 pie fell on the ground) from the wooden peel d) how to get decent leoparding, I think.

My favorite again was the plaintain pie. The plaintain were cut a little bit thinner. No butter was used and only lemon infused extra virgin olive oil was drizzled on the pie. For me this was perfect.

A C+ effort. Much to learn, still. Although I like rustic irregularly shaped pies, I'd like to learn how to make a perfectly round pie with a uniform rim.